I slept through to my alarm today! Also got a sllightly later start but I did not come back to the hotel after breakfast! I could say it was because there were MacOS and iOS updates today but the rebooting all happened while I was in the shower.

I went to the Hoshino Coffee closer to me. I usually go to “Grumpy’s” which is further away but I wanted to see what the menu was like at this one. Grumpy’s has a slightly better morning menu than any other Hoshino I’ve been to. Oh and I added the ¥350 salad expecting it to be tiny. Ha.

Then it was off to Akihabara, the weeb capital. Before it was all anime and manga it used to be Electric Town full of parts shops and ham radio stores. The stores are going out of business and in the year I’ve been gone I think it’s down by another 30%. I get emotional thinking about it because this place was big in the formation of all my geekiness. I did have a nice chat with a gentleman from Gibraltar about our declining hobbies and how they’re still fun for us.

I spurred the economy by purchasing a desktop air-driven tube man. I spent a whole ¥1000!

I saw I had a spot saved on Google Maps in Akiba, a coffee shop with cheese toast. I went there to check it out, unsure of why I saved it (probably a TabiEats video). It took a while for anything to arrive because it was a small shop and the guy had particular ways of cutting the bread from the loaf and preparing his coffee. It was all pretty good.

Then I was off to Kanda Myojin Shrine. I went up the “men’s stairs” that I made my poor mom go up on her last trip to Japan.

I still went in the front entrance.

And paid my respects at the shrine.

Then it was off to Nakano Broadway, another weeb paradise. I found the gacha my sister was looking for. I couldn’t get it open and a very butch looking woman (or so I think) helped me open it. If they only let people carry pocket knives here.

I spent a bunch of time at the watch store I go to. This time I bought a watch! Most of the watches are thousands or tens of thousands of dollars but there’s a vintage section and at the end of the vintage section there’s an as-is section. I used to always go back and look at the Vulcain Cricket there. A manual alarm watch is the last watch I want to re-add to my collection since they stole the one my dad had when we had a break-in. The Cricket was gone but they had a Citizen alarm watch! I paid two-thirds for the watch and one-third for a watchband, which kinda tells you how little I actually spent for the watch. But I got it!

I was trying to decide what to do for dinner when I thought I might just get tonkatsu again. There was a highly rated shop in Shinjuku near the hotel which was tiny. Three four-tops, two two-tops, and a small counter. The pork was delicious. A very good hole-in-the-wall store.

And that’s it! I successfully spent the whole day away from my hotel room!